Social Media: The Long Kiss Goodbye

There is no more social media, it is the media, and it’s time to kiss the term “social media” goodbye.

The term “social media” no longer has any usefulness; in fact it is becoming detrimental to the further development of digital business and marketing.

Social media and online media have already relegated traditional media such as newspapers and TV news to third place. 

These once dominant players are now left to following social media to find out what’s going on.

Traditional media’s relegation to news followers rather than news breakers has been clearly demonstrated in events such as the terrible floods in Eastern Australia a few years ago, other natural disasters and even revolutions around the world.

People directly involved in these events were constantly tweeting and posting to Facebook messages, images and video of the events going on as they happened.

Mainstream media was reduced to just rebroadcasting these riveting and harrowing moments, and maybe following up on them later.

Social is the Dominant Media

The web is now the dominant medium with most people getting their news as it happens. The notion of waiting for the 6 o’clock news or tomorrow’s morning newspaper to find out what’s going on in the world is an anachronism.

Most of what you see and read there is hours and often days old, hopelessly out of date, and therefore often inaccurate.

With digital natives getting a constant stream of personalised news and information via their mobile phones, tablets, laptops and PC’s, the old models of media are hopelessly antiquated and almost irrelevant.

They just serve no purpose in the modern world.

As others have said, the social media revolution is over and social won.

Now we just need to get on and use it as best we can, and as I said at the beginning, understand that social media is the media.

That is, it can no longer be considered as something separate, something extra to be done. It needs to be central to what your business is doing.

It’s Not Online, it’s Just Business

The same goes for the terms “online business” and online marketing”, the word “online” needs to be removed so that everybody starts to understand that business, marketing and the media these days is about operating online.

Putting the words online, social or digital in front of these activities delineates them, puts them in a silo when in fact they need to be the central priority of any business activity today.

Any business that isn’t considering how to reinvent itself from the top down to operate in the online world will simply end up sleeping with the fishes.

The same goes for your marketing and communications strategies. If social and online isn’t the central priority, you’re missing your main customer communication opportunity.

If you are considering offline marketing such as newspaper advertising, printed brochures or letterbox drops first, then you haven’t understood where your customer gets their information